Top 5 Mistakes Filmmakers Make With Short Films - Kim Adelman

MAKING IT BIG IN SHORTS: Shorter, Faster, Cheaper: The Ultimate Filmmaker's Guide to Short Films
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Kim Adelman is the author of Making It Big in Shorts. She produced 19 short films that won 30+ awards and played over 150 film festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival four years in a row. Ms. Adelman currently teaches Cinema Production 2 at Mount St. Mary’s University and Low Budget Filmmaking at UCLA Extension, where she was honored as Entertainment Studies Instructor of the Year in 2014 and won the Distinguished Instructor Award in 2016.
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[@filmcourage]

Here is our full interview with Kim - kzbin.info/www/bejne/bnWnZK19r61_aZI

[@johnnhoj6749]

A couple of other points I learned from working on shorts early on... Have professional-looking opening titles, especially if the rest of your film is deliberately rough-looking. They don't have to be elaborate (simple white on black is fine) but if you have credits which are, say, scrawled on post-it notes on a pinboard, shot hand-held it may be an aesthetic choice on your part, but the audience doesn't know that. A Warner Bros film starring Tom Cruise can get away with that because the audience knows that it's deliberate. With your homemade short they don't have their confidence. Seeing a short from an unknown, the audience is unconsciously looking for signs that they can relax with someone who knows what they are doing. Give them those cues. Don't swamp everything with emotionally manipulative music. It gets annoying fast and it's lazy. Think about sound arrangement as creatively as a composer should think about the arrangement of music. I don't mean necessarily elaborate sound design. The exactly-right wind sound effect or sound of a passing train in the distance can be enormously effective despite being really simple and inexpensive. Don't throw everything you ever wanted to say about life and the universe into a 10 minute short. If you try to squeeze in every thought you ever had it's a cramped confusing mess. You end up getting nothing across because no idea has time to breathe, it's superficially skated over, and it's gone before the audience even has time to register it. Tell a simple story well.

[@cinemathequerouge317]

Also get a real graphic designer to create a poster for you. A professional looking poster lends credibility to a project that might otherwise be overlooked.

[@BionicDance]

I couldn't do much about the bad acting in my short film. There were two parts that were just _impossible_ to cast and I eventually just went with people I knew online. One of 'em did a great job, but the other...well... But whatchagonna do; I wasn't going to _not_ make it. It seems to have worked, though; it's already won one award and more film fests are coming up, so...

[@NicoleSeelig]

That's a tough one, isn't it? I suppose if you can find the time to guide your less experienced actor a little, give them ideas on how to improve, or how to connect with the part / motivation, that might help a little. And try to make your more able actor more prominent, too...

[@BrandonJ.Taylor]

Kim is a smart woman. Respect. She has an answer for everything. I have questions and... yep she will know. I appreciate you inviting her.

[@johnnhoj6749]

A couple more points: Don't assume that any music which you vaguely think of as being very old is automatically out of copyright. Some years ago a filmmaker friend was hit because they had a character merely whistle Ravel's Bolero. Some classical composers or writers of popular tunes of the early 20th Century or even late 19th Century died much more recently than you might think. Get signed releases from EVERYONE who appears in or works on the film, whether or not they are paid or you think you are all friends together or you think you have an understanding. A minor TV screening which barely pays shipping costs brings lots of nasties out of the woodwork. An unrealistically hefty demand for cash can easily derail any showings at all.

[@filmcourage]

Have you made any of these mistakes?

[@supervegon8206]

Nope, and hopefully I won't since I'm working on a short film now

[@NicoleSeelig]

Hopefully anyone watching this can at least avoid these mistakes - plenty of other ones we can make 😉😉

[@HistoricMetals]

So the whole point about music is valid, but this seems a little dated in the delivery now that you can use services to simply select a song, pay a commercial fee and use it, or use royalty free music (again usually at a slightly higher fee for commercial vs personal use) and or just have a fiverr artist write you a song. There's about 1000 ways to get a song now, and even well known popular songs by just grabbing a license online from a service for a flat fee (usually). So, while everything she says about using music legally is true, let's not make it seem so draconian. You can solve this problem in about ten minutes for 80% of popular music or passably acceptable royalty free tunes, properly licensed in mere minutes online these days. It's not like it was just ten years ago or even five anymore, when it comes to licensing a song or two.

[@DLVRYDRYVR]

Dang it. My next script starts with vomiting. A LOT of vomiting.

[@BuddyGorey]

On an alarm clock I hope. The rare case where two wrongs make a right

[@DenkyManner]

​@@BuddyGorey While a Beatles song plays

[@BuddyGorey]

@@DenkyManner 🤞🤞

[@DLVRYDRYVR]

@@BuddyGorey haha!

[@DLVRYDRYVR]

@@DenkyManner you guys 🤣

[@rigas333]

Audio and slow moments are a problem

[@cinemathequerouge317]

An audience will forgive poor production values, acting, SFX, But NEVER bad audio! Spend the extra to get a good audio person.. Also, it's a headache to use licensed music, but if you do, don't just fill out the paperwork. Fill it out & have an attorney look over it! There are a million ways to get hit, so a little pain now saves MUCH pain later.

[@RainbowSludge]

Soooo true!

[@RainbowSludge]

*though I don’t forgive bad acting haha!!

[@cinemathequerouge317]

@@RainbowSludge Lol. I don't actually FORGIVE bad acting, as much as I UNDERSTAND it. It's tough when you can't pay people & have to deal with non professional actors who probably have day jobs. Not to mention having to organise schedules. I always tell these people that "a little rehearsal goes a long way." They don't usually listen 😂

[@wexwuthor1776]

Bruce is a great guy.

[@davidalvarado7742]

you CAN use big songs and put it on KZbin, just know that you won’t make money from it

[@alexbradley5835]

A short should only be five minutes long?

[@cinemathequerouge317]

A short can be longer than 5 minutes. Someone once told me that a film should be as long as it needs to be & no longer.

[@BuddyGorey]

@@cinemathequerouge317 Actionable advice

[@Stratmanable]

That's why it's called a short. The shorter you can make ANYTHING, the better. Boil everything down to its bare essentials.

[@artfromtheheart999]

Caps

[@BuddyGorey]

😹

[@eddyjuillerat835]

Jeeze.. I made one with the alarm clock starting...

[@87solarsky]

It'll be interesting to see how A.I. can work around all of the pitfalls she mentions...

[@BuddyGorey]

Ha ha

[@skulduggerypleasant9008]

lmao

[@tshkrel]

Fair use?? Just 5 or 10 seconds of someone singing it? Wth

[@johnnhoj6749]

Fai Use doesn't mean that any usage is fair, however brief: This more or less covers fair use: "Fair use permits a party to use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner's permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research."